About

Hello. Welcome to my blog about British archive television. This will highlight programmes I’ve been watching whilst my Twitter feed – embedded in the blog and also directly accessable via @archivetvmus71 – contains many more archive treats.

The posts are broken up into categories (by decade and type – comedy, drama, etc). You can also explore via the tags lower down the page. Many of the programmes which have multiple posts can also be accessed via the top of the main menu (BBC/ITV/Christmas TV/Doctor Who/Grange Hill).

These top menu options have the posts re-arranged from oldest to newest (WordPress blogs display the newest posts by default). So if you’re looking to read about, say, The Day of the Triffids episode by episode, then selecting it via the BBC button next to the Home button is the best option – since the posts will be in the correct order!

If you notice any broken links or have any comments or suggestions then please leave a message on the relevant post or drop me an email at archivetvmusings@gmail.com

I’ll probably get round to blogging about it eventually – although one of the plusses of tweeting regularly is that I can briefly cover many more series than I’d ever be able to if I was blogging an episode by episode overview. Maybe once I’ve gone through the whole series I might do just a few posts, looking more briefly at the individual episodes whilst taking an overview of the whole series. Something to mull over 🙂

I use the British Newspaper Archive for gathering these listings, an excellent resource, albeit one that you have to pay for. But a year’s sub isn’t that costly (works out at about the cost of an average print magazine each month).

Thanks! My favourite era was 1983-1986. There were three main villains and a few minor villains throughout this time. The show also became a bit darker, and the creator hated the amount of violence, blood/gore and how the show had been sexed up a bit, however it saw it’s peak ratings in 1985. Unfortunately, this is also the time with the least amount of available episodes. Storylines included Harry Mowlam’s hate campaign against the Sugdens (he knocked Jackie Merrick off his motorbike and fled in January 1984), Derek Warner, Tom Merrick and Kevin Haynes poaching at the Home Farm Fish Farm with explosives in March/April 1984, Jack Sugden’s affair with his step-daughter’s friend/co-worker in late 1984, some sort of fire or incident in February 1985 (not enough info to know what happened), Jackie’s serious vehicle accident after colliding with Alan Turner’s land rover on his motorbike in April 1985, Harry, Derek and Keith Johnson committing armed robbery, also with explosives (episode isn’t available online but from later episodes it sounds like Derek killed someone during the incident), Dolly Skilbeck’s miscarriage caused by Harry, the Who Killed Harry Mowlam storyline in January 1986, in which the assailant wasn’t revealed until April, when Derek took vicar Donald Hinton hostage.

I was interested to see your recent tweets on State Of Emergency with Patrick Mower and William Gaunt. I remember seeing this 1975 and it made a strong impression. Do you know of any available recordings of this ? I haven’t come across any.